In his first week on the job in 2009, President Barack Obama pledged the country’s open records laws would be “administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

But it is the face of doubt, not openness, that is prevailing at the moment in this administration’s handling of transparency. That became even more apparent with the publication of an Associated Press story that showed many of the Obama administration’s top officials are using secret government email addresses to conduct official business.

This week couldn’t get much worse for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who’s already facing calls for his resignation from the left and the right over the Justice Department’s secretly obtaining phone records of the Associated Press.

Now comes word from CNN that the U.S. Marshals Service lost track of two people in the federal witness protection program who were “identified as known or suspected terrorists,” according to an interim Justice Department Inspector General’s report.

The Marshal’s Service believes both individuals have left the country, though it’s not clear how long ago federal marshals lost track of them, only that “they left the country years ago,” according to one official.

The records, which showed incoming and outgoing calls and the length each call, were for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters as well as general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, the AP’s attorneys said.

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

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